Liberals need to believe in it so bad, they have to create it.

Via NRO:

Leaks from the Chicago police over the weekend, however, indicate that Smollett likely paid two Nigerian-American brothers he knew to orchestrate the attack. Smollett denied any wrongdoing through a statement released to the media by his lawyers.

That the original story broke days just after the Covington narrative fell apart last month didn’t stop it from spreading quicker than a wildfire. Within hours of TMZ’s report, some of America’s most influential politicians and celebrities amplified the story — and the belief that America is a dangerous place for minorities — to millions across the world.

2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Cory Booker described the attack as “an attempted modern-day lynching.” He used the incident to press for more hate-crime legislation. California senator Kamala Harris, who is leading the polls for the 2020 race, repeated Booker’s words. Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the attack as “an affront to our humanity.” Freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez castigated media for describing the incident as a “possible” hate crime. Her colleague Rashida Tlaib wrote that “the right wing is killing and hurting our people.”

Jussie Smollett is the lead actor on the Fox drama Empire and has deep roots in Hollywood and the Democratic party. Celebrities, many of them friends with Smollett, pounced on the story. Pansexual pop star Janelle Monae shared a (now-deleted) photo of her and Smollett on social media, writing that “it is still a risk daily to be a black, out and proud human being.” Smollett’s co-star Grace Byers wrote that “hatred, inequality, racism and discrimination continue to course through our country’s veins.” Rapper T.I. condemned the attack on “OUR PEOPLE” and said “the hits won’t stop until we hit back!” He warned that a “revolution is imminent.”

Keep reading…

So when is media calling to call this out?

Via Daily Caller:

Liberal actor Jussie Smollett is accused of staging a racist and anti-gay attack on himself, which Smollett blamed on supporters of President Donald Trump.

Smollett’s alleged fake “hate crime” appears to be the latest instance of liberals manufacturing hate crimes for attention in the Trump era.

The Daily Caller News Foundation compiled below some of the most outrageous fake hate crimes since Trump was elected, in rough chronological order:

ANTI-MUSLIM HATE CRIME IN MICHIGAN TURNS OUT TO BE A HOAX (NOV. 2016)
A Muslim woman at the University of Michigan received national attention from national outlets like The Washington Post in November 2016 after she claimed a drunk 20-something man threatened to light her on fire if she didn’t remove her hijab. The university condemned the “hateful attack,” which turned out to be a hoax.

BISEXUAL STUDENT FAKES TRUMP-INSPIRED HATE CRIME (NOV. 2016)
Taylor Volk, an openly bisexual senior at North Park University claimed to be the target of hateful notes and emails following Trump’s election in November 2016. Volk told NBC News that “I just want them to stop.” But the “them” referenced by Volk turned out to be herself, as the whole thing was fabricated.

Keep reading…

How dare he expose bias in liberal academia.

Via Fox News:

A professor who fooled prestigious journals into running absurd hoax papers, as a test of their bias, says he may now lose his job because of his actions.

Peter Boghossian was one of three people who collaborated last year to test the standards of various university disciplines, submitting papers loaded with left-wing buzzwords to journals in fields like feminism, race studies, queer studies, and cultural studies.

Many prestigious journals fell for their absurd hoax papers. A leading feminist journal published a section of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf that had simply been re-written with fashionable buzzwords. Another journal published a paper about “rape culture and queer performativity” in dog parks.

The test of the journals was covered by nearly every media outlet, including Fox News.

The three hoaxers all say that they are liberals, but they feared some university disciplines had gone off the deep end and now value politics over truth.

While many saw the professors’ test as important, some within the university system were not amused and are now hitting back at the hoaxers.

“I could be fired,” Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and the only one who works at a university – told Fox News.

Four days before Christmas, Portland State University Vice President Mark McLellan emailed Boghossian that he had been found guilty of “a clear violation of the policies of your employer” for hoaxing the journals without first seeking permission from an “Institutional Review Board”.

Institutional Review Board rules mandate “informed consent” from “human subjects” – in this case, the fooled journal editors – meaning the university would have required him to get consent from the journals in advance of sending the hoax papers. Boghossian notes that would have defeated the whole point.

Boghossian says the university has assigned him extra training as a punishment – but that a more serious punishment, to be determined by the university’s President and Provost, will also be announced soon, that may include his termination.

Keep reading…

Ummm, no.

Virtually all these things turn out to be fake.

Via Daily Wire:

In mid-November, a Drake University student told school officials she had received four racist notes in one of the residence halls, at least one of which was addressed to her.

After a police and school investigation, the student, who has not been charged or named, admitted to writing one of the notes. The Des Moines Register reports that Drake officials “are confident the four notes reported by the female student were hoaxes.”

The student who sent the four hoax notes now faces harassment charges, according to Sgt. Paul Parizek, a Des Moines, IA, police spokesman (whether she will actually be charged remains to be seen and is unlikely). Drake spokesman Jarad Bernstein told the Register that the student also faces a campus discipline procedure, which could result in her expulsion. Again, this is unlikely, as most hoaxers claim they were trying to “start a dialogue” and get a pass.

Keep reading…

Lack of information on the components of the device.

Via Helena IR:

A pair of devices made to look like bombs left outside the KTVQ building were detonated by the Billings Police Department bomb squad Monday night.

The devices didn’t have explosive components, according to Sgt. Jason Gartner, but were made to appear threatening.

KTVQ News Director Jon Stepanek said he encountered a man speaking incoherently who left a clear tote at the station’s east entrance.

The man didn’t respond to Stepanek’s questions before leaving, and the station contacted police.

Officers were first notified at about 4:30 p.m. Gartner said he was called to bring in the bomb squad at about 7:30 p.m. He said he was unsure about the time delay in notifications.

Police recommended that the station move employees away from the entrance area, but the station was able to continue normal operations and aired the 9 p.m. news as scheduled.

Police found “religious writings” on the tote, and saw a device inside the tote and another outside the tote that “could be consistent with an IED,” Gartner said.

A robot was used to further examine the devices and then disarm them. A water shot, which separates components in a potential explosive to render them inert, was used on the device in the tote and the device outside the tote.

Both detonations had a gunshot-like noise with no visible explosion.

Gartner said that he couldn’t be sure what the intentions were of the man who left the devices, but that the devices were made to appear threatening.

Keep reading…

Via Fox News:

The string of packaged bombs sent to several Democratic figures and critics of President Trump this week were “not hoax devices,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said Friday.

Wray’s comments came during a news conference announcing the arrest of mail bombing suspect Cesar Sayoc Jr. and addressed internet conspiracy theories that the devices were a “false flag,” or a staged attack designed to help the targeted figures, the Washington Post reported.

He called the more than a dozen bombs intercepted so far “IEDs,” or improvised explosive devices.

“Though we’re still analyzing the devices in our laboratory, these are not hoax devices,” Wray said.

Justice Department officials said that Sayoc, 56, of Aventura, Fla., is charged with interstate transportation of an explosive, illegal mailing of explosives, threats against former presidents and certain other persons, threatening interstate communication and assaulting federal officers, according to the Hill.

“We do believe we have caught the right guy,” Wray said, adding that the investigation is still ongoing.

“We need all hands on deck, we need to stay vigilant,” Wray said.

The charges could either be expanded or lessened, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, adding that Sayoc could face up to 48 years in prison if convicted.

“Let this be a lesson to anyone, regardless of their political beliefs, that we will bring the full force of law against anyone who attempts to use threats, intimidation and outright violence to further an agenda,” Sessions said. “We will find you. We will prosecute you.”[…]

Trump also told reporters that he wasn’t bothered by the fact that suspect Sayoc was believed to be a supporter of his.

“Not at all,” the president said, according to the Washington Times. “You look at what happened to Steve Scalise. That was a supporter of a different party.” Scalise, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, was wounded last year in a shooting in Virginia. The attacker, who later died of injuries suffered in a shootout with police, was reportedly a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Keep reading…

Will still go in the books as a hate crime.

Via Daily Wire:

The latest in a long string of hate-crime hoaxes comes from Ohio, where a woman claimed she received death threats — only for police to discover she sent the threats to herself.

Anna Ayers, a journalism major and a member of the Student Senate at Ohio University, claimed she found two of the threatening notes — one of which contained a death threat — in her desk drawer at her office in the Student Senate Office. She said she also found a “hateful, harassing” message at her residence that used a derogatory term in reference to her being a member of the LGBT community, according to the student newspaper The Post Athens.

Ayers was also on the Post’s publishing board and a former columnist.

The Student Senate devoted time to discussing the notes. An emotional Ayers claimed she was “angry, frustrated and disappointed” after the first threat, and called her parents to tell them about it. Because two of the messages were found in her Student Senate desk, the threats were at first believed to have come from another member of the organization.

“Senate will never be the same for me,” Ayers said in front of her Student Senate peers. “The friendships will continue to grow, and our successes will always evoke pride, but the memory of my time in senate and at OU will be marred by this experience. We will all have a memory of a time when this body failed one of its own.”[…]

On Monday, Ayers was arrested by OU police for sending the threats to herself. She was charged with making three false reports to police. A false report of this nature is considered a first-degree misdemeanor. She faces a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for each charge. Considering how previous hate-crime hoaxes have been treated, she won’t receive anything close to that.

Keep reading…

#Erdogan gathers Muslim leaders in #SouthAfrica for a meeting, tells them foreign powers created project hoax terror organisations such as #AlQaida , #ISIL, #BokoHaram & #alShabab to smear & attack Muslims. pic.twitter.com/181KFyVGRR

— Abdullah Bozkurt (@abdbozkurt) July 26, 2018

Here’s the thing. Unless Jennifer Lopez is thinking of breaking the law, putting her childs fate in the hands of smugglers and leaving her other children behind in the process, she has nothing in common with this irresponsible mother. But she is irresponsible in spreading these false pictures.

Via Daily Wire:

Actress and singer Jennifer Lopez joined in the chorus of emotional outrage over the border crisis by sharing two hoax photographs.

Starting on her Instagram account, Jennifer Lopez shared the infamous photo of the crying Honduran girl, the same one that Time magazine used on its cover to portray President Trump as a heartless ogre. The powerful photo, one that has pulled people’s heartstrings to the point of generating $18 million for a Facebook fundraiser, has since been outed as a fake, not in authenticity but in context.

Keep reading…

Shocker.

Via NBC:

A 13-year-old girl will be charged after authorities say she lied about being held at knifepoint by a man who ripped off her headscarf.

The teen told police that she was in the area of Jato Court and Riverview Lane in Woodbridge on April 6 around 4 p.m. when an unknown man approached her.

She said the man put a knife against her arm and called her a “terrorist.” She claimed he then covered her mouth to muffle her screams and removed her headscarf before fleeing.

Investigators say they determined that the alleged encounter never happened.

Detectives have obtained a petition, charging the teen with knowingly filing a false police report.

HT: Cameron Gray

Hilarious.

Via Daily Caller:

The biggest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook was a fake account with ties to a middle-aged white man in Australia, according to a new report.

CNN reported Monday that the “Black Lives Matter” page with nearly 700,000 followers was transferring fundraised dollars to Australian bank accounts and had links to various accounts and websites run by an Australian man.

Facebook only suspended the page after multiple inquiries from CNN, even though Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, said she had warned Facebook that the page was a scam months ago.

The “Black Lives Matter” page repeatedly linked to websites run by Ian Mackay, an official for the National Union of Workers in Australia.

Keep reading…

The hoax started with ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’

Via The College Fix:

Twelve months before the U.S. presidential election, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Jarred Prier got a taste of Russia’s covert efforts in American political affairs without recognizing the flavor.

It was November 11, 2015. Prier was in Washington browsing Twitter for news about his alma mater, the University of Missouri, where racial protesters had just succeeded in ousting the university system’s president.

#PrayForMizzou was trending. Backlash against the protesters had escalated fears of violence on campus. Intrigued, Prier began pouring over tweets supportive of Mizzou protesters.

Activists on the ground were sharing minute-by-minute updates of campus, where encamped protesters had claimed the university’s quad as their headquarters.

Still other Twitter users, veiled by pseudonyms, claimed Mizzou’s campus was in the midst of a violent street war.

“The cops are marching with the KKK!” wrote @FanFan1911. “They beat up my little brother! Watch out!” The tweet included a photo of bruised black child, ostensibly the Twitter user’s younger brother.

Like many other alarmist Mizzou-related tweets that day, it appeared to have been widely shared.

The only problem, Prier quickly determined: The photo had been lifted from 2013 news reports of alleged police brutality in Ohio.

He suspected the heightened notice the tweet drew was no accident. In addition to well-meaning users who shared it, the tweet had been boosted by dozens of apparently fake accounts.

In an act of one-off online vigilantism, Prier fired back at @FanFan1911: “[S]top spreading lies.”

It didn’t work.

Mizzou was not embroiled in chaotic street-by-street fighting, but these outwardly authentic social media hoaxes scored an apparent win: goading Mizzou’s student body president into tweeting that the Ku Klux Klan was on campus.

Keep reading…

Will Trudeau apologize?

Via National Post:

Toronto police say an 11-year-old girl’s report of having her hijab cut by a scissors-wielding man as she walked to school last week did not happen.

Police had been investigating the alleged incident as a hate crime and now say their investigation is concluded.

The alleged incident captured national attention after it was reported Friday and drew public condemnation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Keep reading…

Not his first rodeo. Update to this story.

Via Fox News:

A 25-year-old California man was arrested in connection to an online quarrel between two “Call of Duty” gamers that prompted a hoax call and led to a man being killed by police in Kansas.

Los Angeles police on Friday arrested Tyler Barriss, who law enforcement claimed is the “prankster” who called 911 and made up a story about a kidnapping in Wichita, ABC 7 reported.

Barriss reportedly gave police the address he believed the other gamer lived.

In the audio of the 911 call, the caller claimed his father had been shot in the head and that he was holding his mother and a sibling at gunpoint. The caller added that he poured gasoline inside the home and “might just set it on fire.”

Here is the 911 call that lead to the deadly swatting in Kansas. https://t.co/nXG1WUKKsa
— Candi Bolden (@CandiBolds) December 30, 2017

The address was for the home of Andrew Finch, 28, whom police believed was not involved in any argument on “Call of Duty.”

Keep reading…

2017 isn’t over.

Via The College Fix:

Over the last year, it seems as if more campus hate crimes turned out to be hoaxes than legitimate acts of hate. Schools tended to be fertile ground for overzealous students looking to prove there is hate where none exists. These 17 examples show 2017 continued to be a year in which hate-crime hoaxes are an epidemic with no end in sight.

Some anecdotes are fallout from post-election antics spawned in late November 2016 in the wake of the Donald Trump presidency. The rest originated in apparent desperate attempts to push a progressive narrative.

Student cries KKK — except it was a sheet over lab equipment
Jan. 2017

A Bowling Green State University student falsely identified a cover for a piece of equipment as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. After seeing a white, pointy figure in a classroom window, the student took to Twitter to post the image and dramatically stated there was an “ACTIVE KKK group” at BGSU. After the university looked into this claim, they discovered what the student tweeted was a cover on a piece of lab equipment. Whoops.

Black student sent threatening ‘KKK’ messages
Jan. 2017

A 14 year-old African-American student was disciplined for sending a threatening tweet to her high school under the Twitter handle “@KoolkidsKlankkk.” The message read “We’re planning to attack tomorrow.” But a police investigation found the Twitter account was run by progressive student activists.

Another anti-Muslim hate crime claim bites the dust
Jan. 2017

A day after the election of President Trump, a female San Diego University student claimed she was approached by two men in a parking garage stairwell who invoked the name of the newly elected president “before attacking [her] and stealing her car.” The student claimed that these men said things like “Now that Trump is president get ready to start fleeing.” Turns out, she had forgotten where she parked. After police in January disproved her claim, the student “decided not to pursue charges.”

Keep reading…

Fake complaints like this just waste resources that could be spent on actual crimes. But they feed the narrative.

Via Daily Wire:

On Friday, Yasmin Seweid, 19, the Muslim college student at Baruch College who lied to police, telling them she had been harassed on the New York subway by white men who attempted to seize her hijab, pleaded guilty to falsely reporting an incident and disorderly conduct.

Seweid had claimed the incident occurred on the No. 6 train on Dec. 1, 2016. She told The New York Daily News that three drunk white men screamed “Donald Trump!” and hurled anti-Islam slurs at her, then tried to rip her hijab off of her head. She stated, “I heard them say something very loudly, something about Donald Trump … I also heard them say the word terrorist and I sort of got a little scared.”

She added that they said, “Oh look, a (expletive) terrorist … Get the hell out of the country! You don’t belong here!” She said when she tried to ignore them, they pulled on her bag to get her attention and the strap broke. “That’s when I turned around and said ‘can you please leave me alone,’ and they started laughing,” she said.

Keep reading…

The next Mizzou.

Via The College Fix:

Even if you’re caught in a hate-crime hoax, chances are good you won’t be sanctioned beyond being outed as a liar.

Dauntarius Williams won’t face charges for filing a false police report about the n-word graffiti and threat he painted on his own car near Kansas State University, The Kansas City Star reports.

Riley County Police said that because Williams admitted he was behind the graffiti and was “genuinely remorseful,” it would “not be in the best interests” of the community to charge him.

Williams wrote in a statement distributed by police that the graffiti was a “Halloween prank that got out of hand”. […]

Police Director Brad Schoen excused Williams’ behavior because he’s a “young man who made a mistake and is now doing his best to own up to it.”

Keep reading…

When has Antifa held a peaceful rally?

Via Oregon Live:

A new anti-fascist group plans a rally Saturday in downtown Portland – part of series scheduled in cities across the country – but the demonstrations have whipped up a heap of warnings by right-wing groups on social media that the gatherings will signal a “civil war.”

Robert Brown, lead organizer for the Portland event, dismissed the claims of planned violence as “nonsense” and a “hoax” intended to scare people from participating in the march. A national spokesman for the group sponsoring the protests, Refuse Fascism, also denounced claims of any attacks during any of the demonstrations.

Since August, Facebook groups, YouTube videos and posts on other social media platforms – including use of the tag #CivilWar2017 – have warned that anti-fascists will cause a violent uprising Nov. 4 against supporters of the Trump administration.

The claims have ranged from the staging of “mass riots” to plans to “kill every single Trump voter, Conservative and gun owner.”

Portland police said they know of no plans for violence during Saturday’s permitted event.

Keep reading…

HT: Wirecutter

Hmmm, I feel like we’ve seen this happen once or twice before.

A black man has been arrested for a series of racist graffiti attacks that shocked minority students starting last fall at Eastern Michigan University.

Last September, “KKK” was sprayed in red, white, and blue paint on a dormitory wall. Along with that, a threat telling black students to “leave” the school was also left on the wall.

In a second incident, the same threat was painted on another building at the end of October.

This spring, a third racist message was left in a university bathroom.

Students and faculty were shocked.

“It really has rocked our community,” Judith Kullberg, an EMU political scientist and president of the faculty Senate, told the Washington Post last year. “In this whole context of a very tense presidential election, it has raised anxiety here considerably.”

But now, Michigan police are reporting the arrest of Eddie Curlin, 29, a black student who studied at the school from 2014 to 2016, the Post reported.

Keep reading…